New site in nginx is downloading PHP instead of executing it

I've just set up a new nginx host and was having problems with visiting it.

Whenever I loaded the page it would download a copy of my index file.

In my case the problem was two-fold. Firstly I had mistyped my server name so it was falling back to an alternative catchall.

Secondly Chromium has a "won't fix" bug whereby redirects are cached. Interestingly the cache also persisted into Incognito mode.

Clearing my cache with the "Clear Browsing History" menu function didn't work to clear out the redirect cache. This gave the symptom of stopping nginx, stopping varnish, and even stopping hhvm but still having Chromium download the file when I tried to visit it.

What did work was to affix a get variable to the link. So instead of visiting http://mysite.local I tried http://mysite.local?foo=1 which invalidated the cache.

This wasn't an entirely satisfactory solution so the next thing I tried was to use the developer tools (ctrl shift I) and then right clicking on the file in the network log. Using the "Clear Browser Cache" option from that popup also worked.

So the TL;DR is:
1) Make sure that your config file is correct
2) Clear out your redirect cache or invalidate it

Comments

Using Fail2Ban to protect a Varnished site from scrapers

I'm using Varnish to cache a fairly busy property site. Varnish works like a bomb for normal users and has greatly improved our page load speed. For bots that are scraping the site, presumably to add the property listings to their own site, though the cache is next to useless since the bots are sequentially trawling through the whole site. I decided to use fail2ban to block IP's who hit the site too often. The first step in doing so was to enable a disk based access log for Varnish so that fail2ban will have something to work with. This means setting up varnishncsa. Add this to your /etc/rc.local file: varnishncsa -a -w /var/log/varnish/access.log -D -P /var/run/varnishncsa.pid This starts up varnishncsa in daemon mode and appends Varnish access attempts to /var/log/varnish/access.log Now edit or create /etc/logrotate.d/varnish and make an entry to rotate this access log: /var/log/varnish/*log { create 640 http log compress ...

Translating a bit of the idea behind domain driven design into code architecture

I've often participated in arguments discussions about whether thin models or thin controllers should be preferred. The wisdom of a thin controller is that if you need to test your controller in isolation then you need to stub the dependencies of your request and response. It also violates the single responsibility principal because the controller could have multiple reasons to change. Seemingly, the alternative is to settle on having fat models. This results in having domain logic right next to your persistence logic. If you ever want to change your persistence layer you're going to be in for a painful time. That's a bit of a cargo cult argument because honestly who does that, but it's also a violation of the single responsibility principal. One way to decouple your domain logic from both persistence and controller is to use the "repository pattern". Here we encapsulate domain logic into a data service. This layer deals exclusively with imple...

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted. This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel. A thorough comparison of the patterns is available here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework. It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database. Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Adventures in IT

Search This Blog